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Rez is a community where Jesus welcomes, shapes, and sends disciples for the good of our neighborhood. No matter where you are in life, this is a place for you.
Life Together In The Goodness Of God
Most of us, I think, might consider ourselves not great at math, like we all know someone who's better at math than us. But actually, I have good news for you. I think you're actually really good at math. I think you might actually even be really good accountants. I'd even go that far. But this is what I mean by that. We may not write anything down. We may not keep record or tabs on sort of like our phone or something like that. But we know who owes us an apology. And maybe even how many apologies are owed to us. We know who didn't show up when it mattered. We know who has harmed us, disappointed us. We can pull up the pictures of their faces right now and keep. We have such a good record. We can keep track. It's like a ledger that runs quietly in the back of our imaginations, keeping tabs of all this. And it's running even when we don't notice it, when we deal with other people. This morning's gospel begins with Peter, who is a bit of a mathematician. He's keeping count. And he comes to the Lord and says, Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times. And I think he's being really generous. He thinks he's being really generous. The rabbinic tradition only suggests three times. So Peter's like times two plus one. That's pretty generous. What do you think, Lord? Pat on the back. High five. And Jesus does something really impressive to me, something sort of startling. Even he refuses the whole framework. He refuses the whole assumption. He doesn't offer just a really big number. He says not seven times, but seventy seven times. It's not just a large number. It is the end of numbers. It's a refusal of the whole ledger, the whole tracking, the whole keeping score idea. Then he tells a story about accounts, a slave owes 10,000 talents. A single talent was roughly 15 years of a laborer's wage. So 10,000 of them is a lot of money. In fact, it's so much money, it's not really a debt. It is an impossibility. It is one of those debts that no one can get out of. It's never getting paid off, which means the man's promise. He says, have patience with me. Here he goes. Have patience with me and I will pay you everything, is what the man says. This isn't a financial strategy. This is desperation talking. And the king in this parable forgives him anyway. This huge sum. Not because he expects that the man's going to be able to pay him back someday. The text says he forgave him out of pity. But then that same desperate man, who in this insurmountable, impossible debt, walks outside, grabs a fellow slave by the neck who owes him over a hundred denarii's wages, an actual payable debt, something that someone could actually pay off over time, and he grabs him by the throat as if the mercy he just received wasn't meant for anyone else, just for himself. This servant's withholding mercy, it not only hurts him, but it hurts this fellow servant. It perpetuates this cycle that he was just freed from, but now he has caged himself and another back in. Miroslav Volf, a theologian, writes, Our actions are irreversible, and the urge for vengeance seems irrepressible. The only way out is through forgiveness. A genuinely free act, which does not merely react. Forgiveness breaks the power of the remembered past, and so makes the spiral of vengeance grind to a halt. This is from a book he wrote, a wonderful book called Exclusion and Embrace. In other words, forgiveness not only frees us, it frees others from this never-ending spiral of debts and ledgers and grudges that keep us caged. And Paul knows this when he's writing to this church. Did you hear this really bizarre reading from Romans, by the way? Thank you for that, Max, but it's like, it felt like it's picking on vegans, right? Anyways, there's a whole context there. That's not the point. The point is, the church has been petty over things like this for a very long time, right? We have been just as petty, right? What to eat, which days to observe. This is a description of a community that's keeping count of each other, right? Very legalistically. And Paul writes, not saying that the disagreements are trivial. This is dumb, stop it. No, actually, he doesn't say that. He says, stop keeping score on each other. What are you doing? How did we even get here in the first place? He wrote, he wrote this really profound line. We do not live to ourselves. We do not die to ourselves. Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lords. So how does that good news sink in practically to people like us who keep account, who keep the score naturally? How do we experience a sense of ourselves that's more determined by being the Lords than any other identifier in our lives or in this world? I think it means we're not our achievements. I think it means we're also not our failures. We aren't our convictions. We're not our beliefs. We are not our political party or our political views, whatever they may be. We are not our net worth. When you open your banking app and you see your balance, that's not you. You're also not your debt. When you look at your credit cards or the ways you're behind, that is not you. And neither is that your neighbor. We shouldn't look at each other that way. That's not them either. We belong to the Lord. Can you let that sink in? Can you feel the good news of that? We belong to the Lord. There is a claim on you and I that Christ himself has made. We are loved by the creator of the universe. We're the Lords. And when we make that identity home base, when in other words we allow God to gather us and bring us home, to live in the world that Christ has made a difference in for our sake, that world, reality, we can then do all kinds of things that we didn't think we had the power to do. First and foremost, forgiveness. When we are the Lords, we're standing on a different ground, a ground of forgiveness, a ground that makes forgiveness possible for us. And we see each other not by scores or values or things that we sort of ascribe to people, but we see them as Jesus' own. And without that home base of identity for yourself and for your neighbors, we are just like the man who asks for forgiveness, for instance, when we do confession or comes to this table or receives love from your neighbor this morning and then goes into the world and grabs a fellow neighbor by the throat and says, what do you owe me? We're no different. Unless that mercy, unless that gift doesn't stop just with you. Unless that forgiveness that you receive from the Lord, the food that you receive here flows through you to other people. And because you are the Lords, that's possible. In fact, that's the call. This is the invitation. You yourself, just so I could blame you and prove it to you, pray, forgive us our trespasses. And that's not the end of the sentence. How does it finish? As we forgive those who trespass against us. Oh, see what I'm saying? The people in the live stream, it was, how's it go? As we forgive those who trespass against us is what they said. You probably said on the live stream too. As we are receiving forgiveness, we then extend forgiveness to others. Now, and actually, you know what I'd add to this? I think you actually don't receive forgiveness if you don't extend it to others. Not meaning God's stingy, but I don't think you really receive it. Does that make sense? The forgiveness that God grants to you, when you receive it as gift, it's freely given as gift. That's how it works. A really clear example of this, I think, comes from a reading in Genesis 50. Joseph's brothers are living in the remembered past, as Wolf would put it. Standing before Joseph, they assume that he has kept a grudge. He's kept an account of all of the crime that they have done to him. If you remember, if you don't remember the story, Joseph was abandoned and sold into slavery by his brothers, wishing him dead, essentially. That's a hard one to get over, right? They assume that spiral of debt is coming for them. They're going to have to pay up now that Joseph's in power and they come to him. But Joseph, instead, he weeps and he says to them, am I in the place of God? He refuses, in other words, the grudge. The whole assumption around keeping accounts. And he goes further than just reacting. He says, I myself will provide for you and for your little ones. Mercy upon mercy. It's incredible. He doesn't only release them. He feeds them. That is what a broken spiral of debt looks like. There's something about that. I'd say also, that's what God is like with us. Not only do I release you, I feed you. And so as people who follow Jesus, so must we, right? Doesn't that track? Am I making sense? It's 11.15. It's not so early. You guys are with me, right? You guys probably already had lunch and brunch and everything. Can you imagine, just for a moment, what an ethic like that, taking shape in a church, would do in a world like ours? Can you imagine the church, Christians, being known as people like Joseph, not only releasing us, but feeding us? Not only forgiving, but going the extra mile and giving mercy? Making things right? Reconciliation? In Christ, friends, the reality is, because we are in Christ, because Christ has done this for us, we belong to each other. And we owe this to one another, in fact, this kind of reconciliation. We are not a community that is built around people who all like the same thing. Some of you don't like Austin FC or soccer. I don't understand that, but you're welcome to be here, right? When we don't agree with one another. Or when one of our brothers and sisters does us harm. That is not what makes us community. That is not the basis. Whenever that's threatened, that's not the bottom level. There's a deeper grounding, and it's the love of Christ that has grounded us, that holds us, so that we can do the work of reconciliation and forgiveness. And that's not to say accountability doesn't have a place. It does. It's a bit of another sermon. But we stand on such solid ground, because we are Christ's, we can do this work with one another. It is very slow and unglamorous, unexciting work. At times it's often even scary, I would say. But when we have the courage, standing at home with Christ, to offer forgiveness to our brothers and sisters, everyone's liberated in the equation. It's good news for everyone. And also, friends, it may not be apparent to us, but when we forgive, there is power to heal and to be healed when we forgive. It's a power the world doesn't know much about, sadly. It's the power that we receive when we come to this table in very unglamorous forms of bread and wine. It's the good news that we can stop counting, because the only account that ever mattered, our sin, our brokenness, that's already been settled. Christ himself has settled this, not out of obligation, and not because any of us could pay, but out of self-giving love, out of generosity, Christ has settled that account for us, laying down his own life for us, dying for us, being raised for us. Christ, our Lord, offered himself out of love, the same kind of love that we are then sent to love one another. And that power that God gives us, it has the power to break those cycles of shame and sin, those spirals of debt, the valuations we lay on other people, all of that can be refused and broken by the power of Christ that he's given to us. I wonder where you could use that power, where you could use maybe a little bit of an encouragement, a little push, where in your lives you sense a debt that you could release. And maybe it's time, you know, a debt that you can release, or maybe someone you owe an apology to. Someone comes to mind that makes you think, I can make that right, it's probably time for me to do that. I wonder if there's something, even before all of that, to be honest, that you might bring before the Lord and say, God, can we make this right? Can you forgive me for this? Friends, in order to truly confess before God some of these heavy, painful, old things in our lives, we have to trust, we have to know and trust that God is good and is worthy of that trust. We have to know that from all of these texts and everything I'm trying to share with you today, we have to know the kind of God that God is, not one that is holding grudges and at the start just totally pissed at you. No, but a God who's full of love, eager to run out to meet you and bring you home, a God who wants to forgive and release you and let you go play and have a life, be filled with joy. That's who God is. God is desperate to give you love. God is desperate to forgive you. And I think when we know that that's really who God is, we might have a little bit more courage to entrust that God with such heavy things, asking for forgiveness. Beloved, this is the power of forgiveness, and it's available to us in real life with the things you actually carry this morning. May we follow the son who canceled our debt and broke that spiral. And may we follow him who was raised by the Father, Jesus Christ our Lord, who, by the way, is still alive and present to us, still setting us free, still setting others free. And now we get to join in that work, not only in our lives, but in the lives of other people. Amen? Amen.